It’s been a dark year for U.S. airline travelers, with Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and United Continental all experiencing significant business disruptions due to computer system failures.

In each case, a technology failure led to thousands of flight delays and trip cancellations, costing these companies millions in extra costs, drops in share prices and brand damage.

Being the owner of a hosting company, I see thousands of data breach attempts on a weekly basis. The attempts are crafty, pointed, and have one purpose–breaching our servers. Even though we’ve invested exorbitant amounts of time and money to protect our infrastructure, it still makes us nervous.

You too should be nervous, as the target of a potential data breach is small to medium business infrastructure as much as it is that of a large corporation.

Over the past several months we have published a number of articles dealing with cyber warfare and related Internet phishing/hacking attacks. In those pieces we reminded small- and medium-business owners that they are not immune from cyber attacks even though many consider themselves safe due to their size. We have also examined the fact that your very own website could be under attack and you might not even be aware of it! We also gave you some tips on how to ensure that many of the most basic tenants of IT procedures are followed.

The Private Business Owner – A Generational Equity Blog

The Private Business Owner is an online publication sponsored by Generational Equity. PBO aims to provide useful tips and information that will improve both the lives and businesses of entrepreneurs, as well as provide valuable insight into the company exit process through bi-weekly M&A Digests.